I think of Yeats’ great poem. I watch the election campaigners distort and obfuscate as they tour the nation’s outposts, pumping their falsehoods across all media platforms. I should cut Sir Keir some slack: a good guy but, being a Thunderbird, restricted. Sir Ed.- another good guy, persuaded to play the aquatic buffoon to get attention. Dishi Rishi, politically clueless, whose early departure from Normandy said rather too much about him. And Farage, whose lies have infected the nation as much at Johnson’s over so many years. Now he peddles his ‘contract’ from Clacton to Merthyr Tydfil, seeking out the embittered to indoctrinate.

And so to Yeats, whose poem, written in 1920 during the continuing turbulence after the First World War. Its relevance today, gives me a jolt. ‘The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.’
Enough said.

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Tags: Literature., poetry, william-butler-yeats, yeats